Todd Boehly’s stint as Chelsea chair is over. Boehly and his fellow American minority stakeholder Mark Walter have sold their 12.8% stakes in the club to Clearlake Capital, drawing a line under a four-year period in which Boehly — who took over Chelsea’s daily operations after the takeover group’s May 2022 purchase of the club from the sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich — saw his influence steadily wane.
The change of hands closes an era whose sporting record makes uncomfortable reading for a club that was Premier League champion as recently as 2017 and 2015 and a Champions League winner in 2021. Since the takeover, Chelsea have finished 12th, sixth, fourth and 10th in the Premier League. Thomas Tuchel, the manager in place when the new owners arrived, was sacked, and five permanent and four interim managers have been installed since. The club now employs five sporting directors.
The transfer ledger has been just as striking. Roughly $2.37bn (£1.78bn) has been spent on 60 new players, according to Transfermarkt, while the same source values Chelsea’s current first team at $1.23bn (£920m) — a portfolio of assets now worth about half what was paid for it. Among the arrivals were Mykhailo Mudryk, described in the analysis as one of the Premier League’s all-time busts, and Raheem Sterling, described as one of its worst contracts. Chelsea also set a new Premier League record for the biggest pre-tax loss, and sold its women’s team to itself as part of accounting measures intended to keep the club on the right side of financial regulations.
On the list of things not accomplished sit a credible title challenge, qualification for European competition in more than two of the four seasons — which ought to be the rock-bottom minimum for a club of Chelsea’s means — and a new, larger stadium, despite one having been mooted.
None of which prevented the exiting owners from making money. Boehly and Walter bought their stakes as part of the Clearlake takeover group at a club valuation of $3.3bn (£2.5bn) and have now sold at $6.7bn (£5bn), doubling the club’s supposed value across four chaotic years. The Financial Times reported a “modest profit”, which the analysis attributes to the $2.3bn (£1.75bn) of investment the new owners committed when they took over.
For the author Leander Schaerlaeckens, that is precisely the point. He argues the sale marks the final stage of the American ownership model, now enveloping most of the Premier League, in which members of the billionaire class simply pass stakes in teams among themselves, always for at least a little more than they paid. Season-to-season balance sheets are, in this reading, largely immaterial — and so is competitiveness, unless an owner happens to care about fan sentiment. The money is made by holding an ultra-scarce asset for a spell, until somebody else is willing to pay more for it.
The precedents cited run from Old Trafford to Los Angeles to Anfield. The Glazer family bought Manchester United mostly with borrowed money in 2005 for $1.47bn (£800m at the time) and in 2023 sold Sir Jim Ratcliffe a quarter of the club for about $1.6bn (£1.3bn) in cash and infrastructure investment, retaining three-quarters of one of the planet’s most valuable sporting brands. Mark Walter, the column notes, bought the Los Angeles Lakers for $10bn and sold them on for $12.5bn just 14 months later, as he liquidates part of his vast sporting portfolio in the face of a federal investigation into fraud. This summer, a consortium including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought 30% of Liverpool for $2.2bn (£1.65bn) from Fenway Sports Group, which had acquired the club outright for $464m — then £300m — in 2010, a profit the column puts at 1,580%.
The conclusion drawn is that English football’s legacy clubs are now picked up and dumped much as an ordinary investor might trade a stock in an online brokerage account, with little more ceremony than an earnest press release. Clubs, on this account, now exist to make rich people richer, and the model drives neither sporting excellence nor deeper connections with the supporters who give those clubs their value in the first place. Chelsea supporters protested against Boehly’s ownership in 2024. There is, in the author’s view, little anyone can do about it now.